The Medicine Cabinet of Curiosities: An Unconventional by Nick Bakalar

By Nick Bakalar

Delightful doses of clinical miscellany approximately wacky medical professionals and their curious sufferers, from their smallest bones (the stapes) to their heaviest organs (the liver)

In this addictive selection of trivialities, Nicholas Bakalar, the “Vital Signs” columnist for The manhattan Times, spoons out the belongings you by no means discovered you really need to grasp approximately your physique and your wellbeing and fitness.

Bakalar stocks the wonders of drugs, from scientific firsts (in 1667, the 1st survivor of a blood transfusion obtained sheep’s blood) to clinical onlys (rabies is the one infectious ailment that's one hundred pc curable while handled and 100% deadly if not). he's taking a journey of illnesses that belong in horror video clips: liquefying organs, flesh-eating micro organism, mushrooms sprouting within the throat. He notes striking treatments, equivalent to darkish chocolate, that can stand in for blood-pressure drugs. And he dissects the chemistry of the human physique (including the 0.0000000000000015259 percentage that's radium).

With a specialist’s recognition to the humorous bone in addition to the grey subject, Bakalar tickles the interest of either the fit and the hypochondriac, following Voltaire’s dictum that “the artwork of drugs involves a laugh the sufferer whereas nature remedies the disease.”

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Extra resources for The Medicine Cabinet of Curiosities: An Unconventional Compendium of Health Facts and Oddities, from Asthmatic Mice to Plants that Can Kill

Example text

From there he went on to technical and management positions in the government and industry. Edlefsen was interested in vapor pressure in soil and in the broad field of thermodynamics of soil moisture. He collaborated with Alfred B. C. Anderson (1906-) in writing a comprehensive monograph "Thermodynamics of Soil Moisture" (Edlefsen and Anderson, 1943), published as an issue of Hilgardia, containing 175 references, and which was for a great many years the standard reference in this area of soils.

F. Lutz (1907- ), the 1940 chairman of Division S-I, in Early Soil Physics into the Mid-20th Century 35 1977 prepared an excellent "History of the Soil Science Society of America" (Lutz, 1977). It was in this era that the Soil Conservation Service was created in the United States to deal formally with preservation of soils, which were being lost to wind and water erosion. Hugh Hammond Bennett (1881-1960) , whose work and writings (1939; Brink, 1947), so clearly demonstrated the need for conservation, was a major force in this development.

Frank J. Veihmeyer (1886-1977) in the late 1920s, with colleagues, made extensive studies of soil water conditions and plant growth (Conrad and Veihmeyer, (1929) that later evolved into a definition of available water, which was the difference between field capacity (not rigorously 42 W. H. Gardner defined) and wilting point (Veihmeyer and Hendrickson, 1931, 1933). " Their observations and their concept of available water became widely accepted and, although not supported by modern water-plant growth evidence, did serve to make irrigation a quantitative science.

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